In 2007-2008 as Gretchen Rubin was beginning her "Happiness Project" she shared some excellent thoughts online (see zhurnalyWiki notes [1], [2], [3]). Alas, looking a decade-plus later at the results – her books The Happiness Project and Happier at Home etc – there's a lot more length but not much depth or breadth or height.

First, to get a mundane truth out of the way: Ms Rubin is rather wealthy: a lawyer's daughter who went to Yale law school, clerked for a Supreme Court justice, married the son of Robert Rubin (the former US Treasury Secretary and investment bank CEO). She doesn't need to worry much about money. Maybe that's irrelevant to her happiness.

The Happiness Project's preface summarizes with a big disclaimer the mission of the book:

Could I discover a startling new secret about happiness? Probably not. People have been thinking about happiness for thousands of years, and the great truths about happiness have already been laid out by the most brilliant minds in history. Everything important has been said before. (Even that statement. It was Alfred North Whitehead who said, "Everything important has been said before.") The laws of happiness are as fixed as the laws of chemistry.

But even though I wasn’t making up these laws, I needed to grapple with them for myself. It’s like dieting. We all know the secret of dieting—eat better, eat less, exercise more—it's the application that’s challenging. I had to create a scheme to put happiness ideas into practice in my life.

And what follows? Relentlessly first-person anecdotes, gambit-suggestions to nudge oneself into action, quotations from famous people, ... and few non-obvious insights. Lots of self-described petty behavior, however – egocentrism, anger, and short-sightedness. Plenty of personal data about her family, as well as the author herself. Self-indulgence galore. Not much "So what?"

The book goes month-by-month through a year, in unfortunately pedestrian fashion: January = "vitality" (sleep, exercise, tidy up); February = the Relationship; March = work (blog, experiment); April = parenthood; etc, etc. No visible coherence, just stuff thrown against a wall.

Bottom Line: Happiness is an intrinsically important topic, and there are many extraordinary quotes and important ideas in Ms Rubin's books – but the density is low and the disorganization makes it hard to learn much. Sad.

_{(cf AntiArrogance (2007-12-24), Pursuit of Happiness (2008-11-19), Habitual Virtue (2008-12-18), ...) - ^z - 2023-09-01}